


All The Daughters Of My Father's House

by tielan



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-28
Updated: 2017-03-30
Packaged: 2018-10-12 00:26:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,648
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10477941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tielan/pseuds/tielan





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Solanaceae](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Solanaceae/gifts).



All the long trip to Jedha, Lyra sits tucked into a corner of Saw’s ship while Jyn flits between sitting beside her and wandering off to ask Saw questions.

Guilt and temper beat rough fists against her thoughts, battering them down in a litany of recriminations.

_Why didn’t I stay with Galen? Why didn’t I deal with Orson earlier? I knew he’d come for Galen – one way or the other – but Galen didn’t—wouldn’t— Oh, my love. I should have taken the blaster and confronted Orson and killed him for both of us and Jyn... I should have confronted him when he came for you—_

“Mama?” Her daughter climbs up beside her and snuggles into her side. “Saw says we’re going to the planet of the Whills.”

Lyra drags her thoughts away from her absent husband to her very present daughter. “We’re going to Jedha; yes.”

“Are there Whills on Jedha?”

“There’s the Temple of the Whill Guardians.” Lyra’s hand closes about the small hand that rests on her knee, attempting to comfort her mother when there’s so little to be given. “Whether or not the Whills are still there...nobody knows.”

“What are Whills?”

She feels the the crystal around her neck, warm and weighty, like a burden of ancestry – the things that they once were but no longer.

“Whills are the ghosts of the Jedi who once were.”

“Jedi?”

“Force users.” With a trip of many hours ahead of them and the sickening ache of Galen’s surrender to the Empire, Lyra pulls her daughter up into her lap and takes out the khyber pendant. “Remember how I told you about the Force?”

“It’s all around us, in us; the energy that holds the galaxy together.”

“Well, Jedi are people who can use that energy. Who can...move that energy about and make things happen.”

“What kind of things?”

“Well...” Lyra looks at the knapsack sitting across the hold. “They can move things without touching them. They can sense things that others can’t. And...some of them...some of them can see the future.” Or parts of it.

_Get out,_ said the old woman – a great-aunt’s cousin or something, nothing more than a distant relative to whom Lyra owed anything. But the rheumy blue eyes turned towards Lyra with unerring accuracy and she spoke with certainty.  _Get out while you still can. He brings nothing but death and destruction._ And Lyra had stared, then laughed, young and fierce with the certainty of the young that all doom was for other people.

Death and destruction seemed far away then, like a planet somewhere on the other side of the galaxy, unseeable, unknowable. And yet so swiftly the time passed and the parsecs were swallowed up in space, and what was theoretical became practical, to be used in the service of those who served only their own power...

“Mama? Can I be a Jedi?”

“We have no Jedi in our family.” Not since the distant cousin, whose lightsaber had come to Lyra, and which she had promptly disassembled for parts, keeping only the khyber crystal.

“Can I be a Whill?”

A deep rumble of a laugh comes from the doorway to the cockpit. “If you can’t be a Jedi, then you can’t be a Whill, little one.” Saw rests his shoulder against the wall and looks at Lyra. “The Guardians at the temple say the Whills have gone quiet in the last decade. A disturbance in the Force, they said.”

“Darth Vader?”

“Or the rise of Palpatine.” Saw shrugs. “You know, it’s suggested that he’s a Force-user himself.”

“But he’s not a Jedi.” Lyra blinks and remembers whispered conversations, vague rumours from four years ago when they escaped the ever-growing empire. “The Sith are just legends.”

“All legends have to come from somewhere.”

“What’s the Sith?” Jyn asks, squirming in her mother’s lap. “Mama? Who’s Palpatine?”

And this was the problem with escaping to Lah’mu. They’d lived out of sight of Krennic and the political situation, yes, but they’d also lost sight of what was happening in the politics of the Core worlds. And now that Orson has Galen, Lyra needs to get him back. Which means reconnecting into the political system she thought she’d left behind years ago.

“I’ll need to get to Alderaan. Can one of your pilots get me there?”

Saw frowns. “With whom did you want to make contact?”

“Some academics I once knew.”

“I can get in contact with them—”

“I don’t have time to go through the dance of first contact and ‘who are you really representing’, Saw. They’ll trust me when I turn up on their doorstep.” Lyra makes herself sound confident of that, even if she thinks that some of them might be willing to speak with Saw. However, the last thing she wants is Saw gatekeeping who she speaks with and what messages she receives. Her old friend has a military-trained mind, and is an excellent marshal for people and materiél, but he’s also has tendencies towards paranoia and can be controlling.

Lyra spent the first five years of her daughter’s life at the whim of paranoid and controlling men. She’s not going to get into that ship again.

“If none of your pilots are available, I have enough credits to pay for a commercial flight.”

“Most commercial flighters only take Imperial credits now.”

“I know. I have enough of those, too.” She stares Saw down, and sees the moment he gives way.

“I’ll look after Jyn—”

“Jyn is coming with me.”

“Now, Lyra, jaunting around the galaxy’s no place for a child—”

“Saw, I’m not going to leave her with the Partisans.”

“We have experience dealing with children whose parents have left them.”

“You have experience at turning them into soldiers.” Lyra isn’t in a mood to spare him with pretty words. “Saw, the reason we didn’t stay with you the first time was because we didn’t want her to become one of your child soldiers.”

He’s dogged. “You should have stayed. We could have fought Krennic when he came for Galen.”

“Maybe. Or maybe Orson would have taken him some other way.” Lyra shrugs, well aware that her daughter is listening with her ears wide open, even if she hasn’t said anything. “Either way, it’s happened. And Jyn is coming with me to Alderaan.”

Saw shakes his head, but he knows better than to argue with Lyra on the matter of her family. And he won’t oppose her directly, but he won’t help her either. That’s the way Saw rolls. If you’re not for him, then he’s not going to be for you either.

“Mama?” Jyn is pouting, having been left out of the conversation. “Are we going to Alderaan? I thought we were going to Jedha.”

Lyra looks down at her daughter – so much of Galen’s intensity in that soft, solemn face. “First Jedha,” she says. “Then Alderaan.”

 


	2. Chapter 2

The air on Jedha is hot and dry, and everything is stinky and dusty.

Jyn wants to go back to Lah’mu.

But Papa is somewhere out in the galaxy and it’s up to Jyn and Mama to find him and get him from Uncle Orson (she’s not supposed to call him Uncle Orson anymore, but she forgets in her head) and bring him home. And Jedha is the first place they stop, although not for long.

“The city will be a mess,” Saw warns when Mama says she wants to be off Jedha within 48 hours and stops in the spaceport to book passage off-world. “The Festival of the Saints starts tomorrow and runs for a week. Everyone comes to Temple City for it, even the lowlanders who don’t have skimmers. Stay until it’s over, and it will clear up.”

“Krennic could have him anywhere in a week,” Mama says firmly. “Day after tomorrow, Saw. We’ll manage the crowds.”

But the crowds in the market press against Jyn on all sides, noise and bodies and a sour smell that means people haven’t washed as often as they should. The pack that she’s carrying is heavy, and the pendant cord around her neck irritates her skin. Even the excitement of getting to wear Mama’s khyber crystal isn’t enough to distract her from the heat and the stink and her desire to go back home where everything was just how she liked it.

“Stay with me, Jyn!”

Her protest of, “I’m trying” is lost in the sizzle of frying dough-buns beneath a banner hung with bright streamers, in the squawk and feathered flutter of the caged birds sold for slaughter, in the sudden distant pulse of drums on the air.

Heads turn, and the noise in the streets shifts, subtly changing from everyday rabble to focussed interest, and people begin to shuffle to the sides of the street.

“Jyn!” Mama takes her arm and pulls her away from the frying stall and out into the street. There’s an empty space in the middle of the narrow thoroughfare, rapidly widening as people crowd away from the centre, and they hurry down it to the main marketplace.

“Mama, my arm!”

“We need to make it off this planet, today, Jyn, or Saw will find reasons to keep us here. There’s no time to stand around watching things!”

Jyn bites her lip, swallowing the protest that she wasn’t ‘standing around watching things’ and hurries down the emptying street behind Mama as the light and merry beat of the drums grows ever louder behind them.

They reach the marketplace, stalls and awning shops set back from the centre. Mama checks briefly at the sight of it, then starts directly across the wide open expanse like a laser fire from a blaster. Jyn follows, but there’s a cheer in the street they’ve just left, and she half-turns to see.

A red-and-black clad figure is running directly at her.

Jyn freezes. Then she gasps as the figure’s arms stretch out and she falls over into a tumble that somehow propels her above Jyn’s head in a whirl of black silk, red sashing, and gold tassels. The acrobat lands on her feet to the sound of cheers and applause. She holds Jyn’s gaze with her own, deep blue eyes in a round, dark face, then flashes a white grin. With a laugh, she throws herself backwards, but twists her body somehow so she doesn’t fall on her back, but lands upside-down on her hands in the dust, then pushes off to land lightly on her feet again.

Around them, the market square fills with dancers and drummers. Jyn is seduced by the colour and movement all around her, the grace with which the dancers move, the patterns that the drummers weave among them.

“Hey!” One of the dancers steps out of the pattern, tugging her aside and out of the way of the movements. “Are you okay, kid?”

Jyn stares up at him, tall and dark against the blue sky, the braids at his temple falling all the way to his broad, bare shoulders. “We’re on our way to the spaceport.”

“Jyn!” Mama ducks between whirling dancers and grabs her arm. “What are you doing? We’re going to be late!”

She gives the man a sharp, hard glare, then begins towing Jyn out from the festival, only to pause because she doesn’t know where to step so she won’t get in the way of the ever-moving dancers.

“Spaceport’s that way,” says the dancer. He sounds like he wants to laugh, but when Jyn looks back up at him, only the faintest curve shows to his mouth. He makes a gesture at someone, and one of the drummers steps out of the formation, although he doesn’t falter in the beat.

“Making trouble again?”

“You wish. They’re headed for the spaceport. Give a Merovesch counterpoint?”

The drummer tilts his head and Jyn stares because his eyes are a filmy white. “Not asking much.” But he grins and looks in Jyn’s direction, not quite at her. “Although for the little Whill with the khyber at her throat, not much at all. Come, then.”

He starts beating his drum in a syncopated rhythm that both matches the heavy beat of the other drums, but also moves lightly through it. Jyn is fascinated by the way his hands move on the drumskin. She’s so fascinated she almost doesn’t notice when the dancer starts stomping to the beat, his bare bronzed feet clouding up the yellow dust of the marketplace.

“This way, little Whill and Eagle Mama,” he calls as he steps through the dancers, who part to let them pass.

Mama makes a growling noise in her throat, and pushes Jyn ahead of her. Her mouth is very thin, and her face is very red, and when Jyn turns to look behind them at the drummer who is stepping along behind them, her grip on Jyn’s shoulder tightens. “Keep moving, Jyn!”

“We’ll take you to the spaceport,” says the drummer, following them with no apparent trouble in spite of whatever’s in his eyes. “It’s no trouble, and the great Master Davelyn said that travellers should always be helped along their way.”

“Who’s Master Davelyn?”

“Not now, Jyn.”

“A Jedi Master from long ago. She was big on hospitality to the stranger.” The drummer speaks in time with his beat, almost like a chant. A moment later, he lifts his voice in what’s apparently a song,

“ _Tell me the trouble coming_  
_or silent, stupid be._  
_An untrained one to bring the balance:_  
_chains and shackles free._

_A Jedi walks on light_  
_but darkness in the corners sing._  
_Wait out the night to call the dawn,_  
_Your lives and living bring._ ” 

Ahead of them, the street is clearing, people getting out of the way of the Whill Guardians – dancer and drummer, and the two people they’re taking to the spaceport.

“I don’t know why you’re doing this—” Mama says, stiffly.

“We like a little adventure,” the dancer is walking on his hands, now. He turns around, his bare feet waving in the sunlight overhead and grins at Jyn from upside down before facing forward again.

Behind them, the drummer laughs. “Your daughter wears the old heart of a lightsaber at her throat.”

“We’re not Jedi,” Mama says softly.

“No more than I am.” The drummer’s tenor softens, and Jyn has to stretch her ears to hear what he says next. “Khyber crystals aren’t so common outside the Jedi Order. Most come to us, but some are given to family in the promise of potential.” They make a few more turns with the drumbeat accompanying them, and then the street opens out again, much like it did in the marketplace.

The dancer backflips where he stands, and the drummer finishes with a rattling flourish. “And we’re here.”

The spaceport is crowded, although less so than the streets through which they just came. The transport Mama bargained with the other day is several berths down, and there’s a man looking around out front with a harried expression on his face—

Mama waves at him and starts off, pulling Jyn with her. “We have to go. Thank you for your help.”

Jyn wants to say goodbye and thank you, too, but Mama’s pulling her along too fast, angry at the delays and maybe at Jyn for what happened. So all she manages is a wave at the Whill dancer and his drummer friend, who are watching them go – the drummer with interest, the dancer with amusement.

The drummer lifts a hand, although he’s still not quite looking at Jyn. Then he yelps as the dancer picks him up and spins him around with a kiss.

____

Then Mama and Jyn are on the ramp of the transport, and Mama is pushing her into the cool dry of the hold, out of the heat and the dust and the resonating beat across the city, and Jyn sees them no longer.

____

 

____


End file.
